Women of the Pleasure Quarters

by Lesley Downer

  Okichi, the Foreigner’s Concubine

  As they depart,

  Passing the sampans and spreading their eight sails,

  They think of beloved Shimoda

  And let their tears fall.

  Whilst along the river side

  The dirty water flows from the hovels,

  Behind the doors the sound of the prostitutes’ voices rises:

  “Oh! how grateful we are to the honorable foreigner

  Who gives two dollars for the one-dollar whore.”

  Shimoda boatmen’s song 3

  The key had been turned and the Western boot was firmly wedged in the door. Across the Pacific, a man named Townsend Harris (1804–1878) saw an opportunity to make his name and, with any luck, his fortune too. As the Americans saw it, the 1854 treaty signed by the shogun provided for a consul general to take up residence on Japanese soil. Harris petitioned the American president to give him the post. In August 1856 he arrived at the newly opened port of Shimoda. He raised the Stars and Stripes above Gyokusenji, a beautiful old disused temple, and settled in there with his interpreter and secretary, Henry Heusken. His brief was to conclude a proper commercial treaty.

  The weeks and months that followed were filled with wrangling, interspersed with long periods of inactivity while the Japanese negotiators awaited instruction from Edo. Often ill and with only Heusken for company, Harris needed some way to alleviate the gloom. The red-blooded young Heusken knew the answer. What they needed was women.

  Heusken lodged the request for “nurses” with the burghers of Shimoda. Perfectly natural, they all agreed once he had left. But where was the woman of whom they could ask such a sacrifice? Who would ever voluntarily consent to be fondled by a hairy barbarian who reeked of meat and butter? (The Japanese ate no meat or dairy products and referred to foreigners as bataa-kusai, “stinking of butter.”) Who would want to take on the stigma of being a rashamen, “foreigner’s concubine,” a word whose alternative meaning was “sheep”? The visits of Perry’s American sailors and a Russian fleet had resulted in a rash of pale-skinned babies, all of whom had been clandestinely disposed of in a graveyard in an isolated little valley.

  Heusken had asked for a geisha named Okichi whom Harris had noticed as she was walking home from the bath, looking fresh and comely. Seventeen or eighteen, an adult by the standards of those days, Okichi was a beautiful and popular young woman, famous for her sweet voice and in particular her unforgettably lovely rendition of “Raven at Dawn,” a plaintive ditty about a Yoshiwara courtesan. She has become a legendary heroine in Japan, revered, practically deified—there is a temple dedicated to her in Shimoda—as the first lamb to be sacrificed on the altar of foreign relations.

  Naturally she was reluctant to take on the assignment but the town elders were insistent. On June 13, the consul’s large black-lacquered palanquin, specially made to fit his long legs, arrived to carry her to his residence at Anegasaki. She jolted off on the shoulders of the bearers, escorted by equerries and samurai who cleared a way through the crowds. As she sat inside, hidden behind the bamboo window blind, she could hear the townsfolk jeering, “Here comes a sheep for the consul!”

  The crossroads at Madogahama was the point of no return. Shimoda children still sing a ditty evoking the fear and indecision which Okichi must have felt:

  Shall we go to Anegasaki?

  Shall we return to Shimoda?

  Here is Madogahama. We must decide!

  Harris had had carpenters in to turn the disused temple into a Western home, throwing away the rice straw tatami matting which had become infested by American beetles from the Black Ships and replacing it with Western carpets and furniture. To Okichi it must have been unimaginably alien, full of strange and repellent odors—woolen carpets instead of the familiar new-mown-hay smell of tatami, the whiff of polish on the heavy wooden furniture and, worst of all, the reek of searing animal flesh from the kitchen. Then there was the consul himself with his big, hairy, smelly body; though in the end there was not much difference between what he did on the large uncomfortable Western bed and what other men had done to her in the past.

  After three days Harris discovered that Okichi had a suspicious skin eruption and told her not to visit again until it was cured. She carried on receiving a sizable allowance. But even after the sore had disappeared, whenever the subject of a visit was broached, Harris always decided he was unwell. Two and a half months later he terminated the contract.

  For Okichi the experience must have been utterly traumatic. She had had to sleep with an old and repugnant barbarian, she had had to abrogate her right as a geisha to choose her customers, and then she had been publicly humiliated and found wanting. On top of all this, as her widowed mother pointed out in a letter to the town council, she was ruined. Having been polluted by the touch of the barbarian, no Japanese man would ever touch her again. Not surprisingly, she turned to drink. She became a beggar and years later drowned herself in the river.

  Harris may have forgotten her but the Japanese never did. If you visit Shimoda today, there is a temple dedicated to Okichi Kannon, Kannon being the mother goddess, complete with a sex museum. Here you can see the cliff from where, according to the much embellished legend, Okichi jumped into the sea, having done her bit for international relations.

  The First Madame Butterfly

  The Westerners who poured in to populate the foreign settlements in the country’s growing number of treaty ports ranged from diplomats, missionaries, and scholars to adventurers, misfits, roisterers, and sailors. They had all heard rumors of the legendary geisha and of the walled city of delights, the Yoshiwara, and were eager to learn more.

  In 1885 a languid, rather unpleasant French naval officer who wrote under the pen name of Pierre Loti (1850–1923) sailed into Nagasaki harbor with the express intention of marrying a Japanese wife and writing about it. He had already titillated the world with tales of his exotic love affairs in Turkey and Tahiti. Now, for his Japanese period, he wanted “a little yellow-skinned woman with black hair and cat’s eyes. She must be pretty. Not much bigger than a doll.”

  He spent a mere five weeks in Nagasaki, quite long enough to marry, gather the material for his opus, become bored, and leave again. The object of his brief affections was Kiku (Chrysanthemum), a teahouse girl whom he called Madame Chrysanthème and married for a price of 20 piastres a month. They seem to have had a relationship of mutual contempt. Loti described his wife’s irritating habits, the incessant tap of her tiny pipe bowl against her porcelain smoking box, her bored yawns and mirthless laugh. Asleep, at least, he wrote, she did not bore him. As he was making his farewells, he was horrified to find her cheerily counting the coins he had tossed to her and hitting them with a mallet to test that they were real silver. 4

  Unromantic though Loti’s account was, he had touched a chord. The Western world was thirsty for tales of sweet, gentle Japanese child-women who gave themselves adoringly to Western men, even if the reality was a good deal more mercenary and sordid. John Luther Long’s tragic Madame Butterfly of 1903, pining away for the caddish Lieutenant Pinkerton, was exactly the heroine that Victorian readers had been waiting for. The story was immortalized in Giacomo Puccini’s opera in 1904 and the Western myth—or should we say cliché—of the “geisha” was born. As for the real geisha, living their lives out in Japan, they were made of considerably sterner stuff.

  Plotters in Gion

  Drunk, my head pillowed in a beauty’s lap;

  Awake and sober, grasping power to govern the nation.

  pre-Restoration popular ditty 5

  The coming of the barbarians threw everything into chaos. First there was Perry, then Harris, installed on Japanese soil with his interminable and infernal demands, and behind them the menacing Black Ships lurking just across the horizon. What on earth was to be done? As far as the newly installed twelve-year-old shogun, his regent, councilors, and court in Edo were concerned, there was nothing for it but to concede on every point.
Rusty samurai swords and antique muskets were useless against the might of the foreigner’s firepower.

  It was a matter of national survival. But national pride was also at stake and for the first time in centuries, a sizable proportion of daimyo warlords chose to disagree with the shogun. Some called for war, others argued that the country’s seclusion must at all costs be maintained. The matter was so critical that the emperor himself—normally utterly outside politics—took a stand, in favor of continuing the policy of isolation. The real reason Harris was left twiddling his thumbs in Shimoda for so long was that the emperor refused to sign his treaty.

  In the end, under intolerable pressure, the shogun’s regent signed the document and those presented by the other Western powers without the emperor’s consent. It was an action which sparked an explosion of anger among samurai of all ranks and men of other classes too.

  Disaffected samurai, particularly from the distant provinces of Satsuma and Chofu, followers of the dissident daimyo and others who opposed the shogunate, began to gather in Kyoto. For centuries the political center of the country had been the shogun’s capital, Edo. But now there were two hubs, not one. Kyoto was abuzz with passionate political debate.

  These young blades, mainly in their twenties, united under the twin slogans of “Restore the emperor, expel the barbarian.” Their avowed aim was to oust the shogun and return the emperor to his divinely appointed place at the heart of the nation. For them the natural place to meet, argue, plan, and eventually foment revolution was Gion with its rabbit warren of tiny lanes lit with glowing white lanterns and lined with teahouses and geisha houses. There they could pretend to be wastrels, drinking their lives away. Many also fell in love with geisha who returned their love and were to prove every bit as brave and stubborn as they.

  The young braves on the shogun’s side, meanwhile, spent their evenings carousing in another of the geisha quarters—not Gion but its archrival, Pontocho, on the other side of the river. It would have been far too risky for both sides to have had their plots and secrets overheard by the same geisha, even though the geishas’ code of secrecy theoretically prevented them from ever divulging what they had heard.

  One of the leaders of the rebel imperialists, a romantic, driven young samurai called Takayoshi Kido (1833–1877), held rabble-rousing meetings in Gion, where he fell in love with a beautiful and spirited geisha named Ikumatsu. In August 1864, when fighting broke out on the streets of Kyoto, the shogun’s men came hammering on Ikumatsu’s door. She stood in the entrance, arguing with them long enough to give Kido time to sneak out and escape across the tiled roof. By the time they shoved past her, swords glittering, he was gone.

  For five days, disguised as a beggar, he hid among the down and outs who lived on the riverbank under Nijo Bridge. Ikumatsu crept out by night to take him rice balls. After that he disguised himself to try and shake off his pursuers. One day he was a shampooer, the next an attendant at a public bathhouse or a porter at a coaching inn on the highway out of town. Finally, with Ikumatsu’s help, he escaped from the city and lived under a false name as a shopkeeper in a country town.

  The final push came in 1868. The old emperor had died and been succeeded by his fifteen-year-old son, Mutsuhito, known to history as Emperor Meiji. In Japan the years are named after the reigning emperor; it was Year 1 of the Meiji Era, the beginning of a new age. Kido, Takamori Saigo, and the other rebel leaders, backed by a large military force, seized the imperial palace and declared an end to the rule of the shoguns. Hereafter the emperor would be their titular head and the figurehead of the nation.

  On the outskirts of Kyoto, there was heavy fighting. In the evenings the youthful rebels—who now constituted the imperial army—would be back in Gion, relaxing in the teahouses, arguing, singing, and dancing with the geisha. One night a geisha plucked out a rousing tune on her shamisen. A Choshu samurai, Yajiro Shinagawa, composed the lyrics:

  Miya-sama, Miya-sama, o-uma no maeni

  hira hira suru no nanja ya ya!

  Your Highness, Your Highness,

  What can that be, fluttering before your horse! . . .

  It’s the imperial brocade banner

  that attacks the enemies of the court.

  We’ll shoot down the scoundrels

  who would raise their hands

  against the Mikado,

  emperor of the firmament.

  When the shogunate’s samurai hear the noise

  which way will they run?

  They’ll throw away their castle and their spirit

  and flee eastward.

  The next day Shinagawa handed out copies of “Toko Ton Yare Bushi,” as he called his song, meaning something like “To the Death!” or “Go for Broke!,” and the samurai marched into battle singing lustily. It was Japan’s first war song. Seventeen years later, in 1885, it was hijacked in its entirety by W. S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan to use as the overture and the song of the Mikado’s troops in their operetta The Mikado, in which it is sung in the original Japanese. 6

  From Kyoto the imperial troops marched east, heading for Edo. Shortly afterward the young emperor was installed in the shogun’s palace which would hereafter be the imperial palace. Edo became the new capital and was renamed Tokyo, the “Eastern Capital.”

  The young men who had led the rebellion were the leaders of the new government. They settled in Edo and many brought their geisha lovers to join them. Kido, now one of the most powerful men in the Meiji administration, did not forget his brave and devoted geisha lover, Ikumatsu. First he arranged for her to be adopted into a samurai family, a traditional procedure to make a geisha into a respectable woman, essential in a society where marriage was a matter of creating an alliance between families rather than of individual preference. She was given a new name, Matsuko, and shortly afterward he made her his wife. (To this day when a man wishes to marry his geisha lover, he has first to find an older man from a respectable family who will agree to “adopt” her and act as her “father” at the wedding.)

  The eminent Victorian Algernon Mitford (1837–1916), grandfather of the celebrated Mitford sisters, met her in 1869 and described her as “a bonny little lady, though eyes less familiar with the custom than mine would have objected to the disfigurement of shaved eyebrows and blackened teeth.” He commented on her “ease and grace” as a hostess and added that as a former geisha she had “none of the shyness which I have usually met with in Japanese ladies.” 7

  Thus a Gion geisha rose to the pinnacle of Japanese high society to be the woman behind one of the most powerful men of the realm. Many other rebel leaders married their loyal geisha lovers and all of them, from the bull-like Takamori Saigo to Hirobumi Ito, the country’s first prime minister, kept geisha mistresses.

  The geisha had proved their mettle and, with their unique ability to span the social hierarchy, were poised to become the leading women of their day. The courtesans in their gorgeous cages and the wives of rich men, trapped in their homes, offered no competition. The years that were to come would be the heyday of the geisha, when geisha were at the forefront of society as trend setters, fashion leaders, and the companions and confidantes of powerful men.

  Queens of High Society

  For the Edo-ites who turned out in their tens of thousands to watch the emperor’s grand entry into the city in his palanquin, the Phoenix Chair, on November 26, 1868, it must have seemed as if the world had turned topsy turvy. Was the future to consist of rule by country bumpkin samurai married to geisha lovers? It was as if these queens of the counterculture, who had hitherto played at being great ladies so that merchants could play at being gentlemen, had suddenly turned respectable.

  Still, business was business. In recent years the Yoshiwara, with its population of imprisoned courtesans, had fallen far behind the times. Fashionable young men about town much preferred the chic geisha of the illegal quarters; it was geisha the new oligarchs married, not courtesans. By now all but one of the Yoshiwara houses were small and low
class, offering little more than sex. Still, seeing a new market in the influx of provincial males flocking into the new capital, the Yoshiwara brothel-keepers quickly upgraded 120 courtesans to the top yobidashi rank, thus enabling them to charge far higher fees than for a humble prostitute.

  The enthusiastic young samurai who ran the new government recognized the needs of the city’s growing populace by giving licenses to six areas which had been semilicensed. Whereas the illegal quarters had sprung up around shrines and temples, the natural gathering places under the shogunate, these new licensed quarters were in the bustling population hubs of the new order, at the points where roads from the provinces entered the city, soon to become railway termini: Shinagawa, Shinjuku, Itabashi, Nezu, and two at Senju.

  They also, rather touchingly, attempted to provide for the many foreign gentlemen who were expected to come and work in the city. For despite the slogan “Revere the emperor, expel the barbarian,” it had become apparent not only that the foreigner was here to stay but that he had a myriad of interesting things to teach the fledgling state.

  Shortly after the emperor arrived in Edo, he put his signature to a memo from the leading daimyo recommending that Japan abandon the attitude of “the frog looking at the world from the bottom of a well” and resolve instead to learn from the foreigners, “adopting their best points and making good our own deficiencies.” The Japanese forthwith embarked on a love affair with all things foreign. Young Japanese steamed off on P & O liners to the West to study and the Japanese hired foreign experts—British engineers to share the secrets of the industrial revolution, French to teach them law and military affairs, Germans to teach them about their parliamentary system, and Americans to teach commerce, agriculture, and technology.

  One of the first of the Meiji government’s projects was a pleasure quarter for foreigners. Named the New Shimabara, after the famous quarter in Kyoto, it opened not far from the imperial palace, near present-day Ginza, in 1869. It operated according to the Yoshiwara system, with teahouses serving as houses of assignation for clients to make appointments for the grander brothels. A total of 1,700 courtesans and 200 geisha, including 21 male geisha, moved in from the Yoshiwara to populate its 130 brothels and 84 teahouses.